This invention relates to an electronic dictionary, and in particular to an electronic dictionary capable of handling idioms.
For many years, people have been studying the machine translation technology which can translate written or speaking expressions from one language into another by means of computers. Machine translation is a kind of automatic translation from one language into another (or many others) without human aid. On the basis of linguistic analysis regarding the form and structure of a language, it builds machine lexicon and machine grammar with the mathematical approach, by taking advantage of the huge power of computers in storing and data processing. In order to realize the language translation, a machine translation system has to have the functions of lexicon analysis, syntactic analysis, grammar analysis, lexicon, idiom dictionary, semantic analysis and target language synthesis. However, there is still not an applicable system available yet, since machine translation is a frontier application science relating to linguistics, computational linguistics, computer science and many other subjects. Under this situation, people switched their focus to the electronic dictionary which performs the translation at the word level and is more practical. Electronic dictionary is a kind of new dictionary which stores and utilizes the data in the electronic form. An electronic dictionary is of great flexibility. It can organize the information in the ways of hypermedia and hypertext, support various retrieval methods, offer the feature of dynamic translation, and provide explanations for the retrieved word in the form of text, audio and image.
However, most existing electronic dictionaries can perform word level translation only. In case of there is an English sentence xe2x80x9cHe takes part in the activity.xe2x80x9d, existing electronic dictionaries can give Chinese translations for the single word xe2x80x9ctakexe2x80x9d, while the user can not get the Chinese meaning of xe2x80x9ctake part inxe2x80x9d.
There are some electronic dictionaries which are capable of idiom level translation. However, they have following restrictions to users:
They can give the translation when the user inputs the idiom as xe2x80x9ctake part inxe2x80x9d. In case of an user inputs a phrase xe2x80x9ctake an active part inxe2x80x9d, these electronic dictionaries will not be able to identify the idiom xe2x80x9ctake part inxe2x80x9d and therefore can not give a useful Chinese translation.
If an user does not provide the correct head word in the idiom, those dictionaries will not give the idiom level translation. In the example of xe2x80x9ctake part inxe2x80x9d, if the user looks up the word xe2x80x9cpartxe2x80x9d or xe2x80x9cinxe2x80x9d in the dictionary, he can not get the translation for the idiom xe2x80x9ctake part inxe2x80x9d.
The electronic dictionary with the idiom processing function according to the present invention will resolve the above problems.
In one illustrative aspect of the invention, an electronic dictionary with an idiom processing feature is operative to perform a technique which comprises:
storing a plurality of entries in the form of electronic data in a memory, each entry composed of a header of a first language and translated expressions in a second language corresponding to the header, wherein said headers include idioms of the first language;
registering a new entry into the memory; and
retrieving the entry corresponding to a query word from the memory;
wherein said retrieving operation includes an idiom processing operation which automatically identifies idioms included in a present sentence from text of the first language and retrieves the corresponding translated expressions in the second language.
The goal, features and advantages of this invention will be understood more fully from the detailed description given hereinbelow, taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings.